1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the control of a pull printing system in which a user sends a request to print data temporarily stored in a server from a printing apparatus to allow the printing apparatus to output the print data acquired according to the request.
2. Description of the Related Art
Japanese Patent No. 4033857 discusses a system, as one of pull printing systems, in which a user sends a request to print page-description language (PDL) data temporarily stored in a server from a printing apparatus.
The printing system allows the user to output print data not to a specific printing apparatus but from a desired printing apparatus at the time of printing from an application. At this point, PDL data temporarily stored in the server are analyzed to allow the user to confirm print setting on the desired printing apparatus.
A conventional pull printing system is capable of analyzing the PDL data using an analysis program adapted to the model of a targeted printing apparatus and the type of PDL and providing print setting information for the user.
For example, assume that the print setting of 4-page data is set to 2in1 and printing is performed by the conventional pull printing system. Herein, PDL data are not analyzed and the conventional pull printing system provides information of mere “4-page 2in1.” For this reason, the conventional pull printing system does not analyze PDL data not to allow providing such detailed information as to indicate output settings to be actually printed by a printing apparatus such as the total number of pages, the number of color pages, and the number of monochrome pages after rendering. Specifically, the conventional pull printing system is not capable of providing detailed information such as “the total number of pages being 2 pages, the number of color pages being 1 page, and the number of monochrome pages being 1 page” as the result of rendering.
Information about the output result needs to be derived by the panel application of the printing apparatus to acquire such detail information. A method for deriving the information is different for each PDL and model. Therefore, it is impractical to previously implement a configuration for deriving information about the output result by the panel application of the printing apparatus onto the printing apparatus in total consideration of combinations of PDLs and a large number of models.
Also in a case where information about the output result is derived by the service of a print server, the print server performs the above processing each time the print server receives a request from the printing apparatus to put a heavy burden on the print server, which may affect the performance thereof.